Remembering Joseph Edward Brown (1947–2024)

Joseph Edward Brown (MLAUD ’72), whose unrelenting promotion of landscape architecture influenced several generations of practitioners, died on Thursday, October 31st, in San Francisco after an extended illness. I was fortunate to have witnessed the loving care his spouse, Jacinta McCann, gave him over the long years of his physical impairment—one of the truest measures of human devotion I have ever encountered.

In my lifetime, there was no stronger champion for the striving achievement of landscape architecture practices than Joe, a tireless man whose energy could not be dampened. The story of his advocacy for the field necessarily starts with the formation of EDAW in 1973, when Garrett Eckbo, Francis Dean, Don Austin, and Ed Williams reincorporated the small but powerfully innovative firm that Eckbo and Williams had originated two decades earlier. EDAW expanded steadily on a wave of emerging environmentalism, delivering new scales of environmental planning including the expansive California Urban Metropolitan Space Study of 1965 and a similar plan for the state of Hawaii in 1970. Joe joined EDAW in 1974 in California and, seeing the East Coast as an opportunity, soon opened the firm’s studio in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1976.

It was in the District of Columbia that Joe developed his full-throated voice for visibility, credibility, and influence for the discipline. Through sustained and strategic promotion, the Alexandria office became a powerhouse in Washington. EDAW’s Alexandria principals assiduously studied how design intersects with governance and public process—the only key to success for anyone working in the capital city. They conquered the art of persuading and winning with agencies including the National Capital Planning Commission, the US Commission of Fine Arts, and the National Park Service. The DC projects were significant, from the Monumental Core Master Plan, Constitution Gardens, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, and the National Museum of the American Indian, to perhaps the ultimate prize in planning the capital city: Joe’s leadership role in a mega-team for the all-important plan for the District and beyond, called Extending the Legacy, in 1997.

Meanwhile EDAW was expanding globally. In 1992, Joe took the reins of the firm as president; satellite offices thrived in Atlanta, Sydney, and London. By 1994, it was a 400-person entity banking on new global markets including Europe, China, and the Global South. By 2000, EDAW stood at 1,000 people. In 2005, EDAW joined the AECOM companies, one of the world’s largest infrastructure consulting firms. With this merger, EDAW’s landscape practice would gain hold on an unlimited market worldwide.

EDAW kept its identity within AECOM for nearly a decade, but in 2009, after its own legacy of 50 years of transformational practice, the firm was consolidated into AECOM. Many viewed this as a diminishment—it was sad to see the Eckbo Dean Austin & Williams legacy retired. But Joe saw his team of landscape architects working on the largest and most complex projects throughout the world. He led AECOM’s Planning, Design, and Development team, and became the Chief Innovation Officer, prior to his retirement in 2016. Joe had moved beyond visibility and credibility for the field; he was satisfied that landscape architects were leading and collaborating everywhere, and he continued to motivate everyone he knew. He was more than once heard saying, “Make big plans now . . . or be prepared to make little plans for a small future.”

An anecdote: In the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, Joe did some teaching at the GSD, mostly workshops in core studios and guest appearances in classes, and we spent a bit of time together, sharing studio reviews and occasional dinners. At the time, I taught the MLA II Proseminar, which aided first-semester students in the shaping of an academic platform for their two years in the program. I’d invited Joe to speak with the class about his career path and his views on practice. Joe headed to the blackboard after a short introduction. There he wrote “EDAW” and “Reed Hilderbrand” across the top. He said he wanted to talk about where this class of students wanted to work once they’d finished their MLA degrees. He explained that if you wanted to have impact, EDAW would take you places you’ve never imagined, where you can design anything. If you want to work in an atelier, then you should work for Gary’s firm; you will really learn how to design, but the impact will be smaller. A friendly hour-long debate ensued. His voice, forever a bit on the raspy side, was always intense, directive, and encouraging. Joe and I remained good friends. We both liked our respective corners of the world.

Whether he saw you as a boutique artist or a large firm collaborator, Joe always seemed to be as keen on your firm’s success as he was on his own, as a range of practitioners attest. Gerdo Aquino FASLA (MLA ’96) of SWA has noted that “Joe was an important mentor to me in my early professional years at EDAW and SWA. He was the one who talked me into attending graduate school—said I wouldn’t regret it. He was a north star for so many of us.” Cindy Sanders FASLA of OLIN said, “Joe was my most significant mentor in the business of the business. He taught me nearly everything I now know about the business of landscape architecture. I was a good student of his academy.” And James Burnett FASLA of OJB observed, “He wanted us all to make it and prosper because he understood how important it was for our firms and our profession to be strong.”

Joe received many accolades in his career, including the 2009 American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Medal, the association’s top honor. That same year—the year of the full merger into AECOM—EDAW received the ASLA Firm of the Year award as well. The most significant recognition in my view, and I like to imagine possibly for him, was Joe being presented with the Landscape Architecture Foundation Medal in 2019. The ceremony in Washington, DC, was deeply affecting, a moment those in attendance will never forget. While Joe was by then barely able to speak, he was fully aware, with Jacinta at his side, that all in the room felt a great sweep of emotion and gratitude for his determined and tireless contributions to the advancement of landscape architecture.

Joe’s dedication to furthering the discipline of landscape architecture persists. Established in 2017 with Jacinta, the Joe Brown and Jacinta McCann Fund for Faculty Research provides support for both new and ongoing research projects conducted by junior faculty in the GSD’s Department of Landscape Architecture or Department of Urban Design, with a particular interest in interdisciplinary projects.

 

Forests Are Cultural Constructs

One hundred thirty years ago, environmentalist and landscape architect Charles Eliot walked the Blue Hills, a vast green swath south of Boston, envisioning its transformation into a wilderness reserve. Looking out to the horizon from the hill’s peak, he saw not a wild forest but hundreds of thousands of coppices— clusters of sprouting trunks created by cutting a tree close to the ground and causing it to release what Anita Berrizbeitia calls “repressed buds” that wait beneath the bark. Walking the same hills Eliot traversed all those years ago, and in the process of researching the wilderness’ origins in archives, Berrizbeitia was surprised to find that Eliot’s Blue Hills reservation plan emerged out of an agricultural forest that provided lumber for settlers for two hundred years, and that he proposed to remove more than 400,000 coppiced trees by using grazing sheep to prevent the sprouts from developing, and then lifting the roots systems out of the ground by hand, one by one—a laborious, time-consuming process.

Her research of the Blue Hills led Berrizbeitia, professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), to consider what makes a forest “wild,” how all forests are culturally constructed, and how our contemporary landscape honors or erases indigenous history. These are the themes that she’s now exploring with her students in “Forests: Histories and Future Narratives,” a course that follows on the heels of Forest Futures, the exhibition she curated at the GSD last spring.

In temperate forests, write Rob Jarman and Pieter D. Kofman in Coppice Forests in Europe, “simple coppicing” can be achieved in mid-winter, when the tree is dormant. Cut the tree near the base, and then, come spring, explains Berrizbeitia, “the energy previously spent on the canopy and the leaves but now entirely contained in the root system is reassigned to dormant buds contained in the remaining stump or in the roots.” The trunk sends up “vigorous growth of straight poles within a short span of time.” The new shoots can be cut at whatever size is required for the lumber’s purpose (firewood, construction, furniture, etc.), and can be harvested over and over again for decades—even centuries—from every three to 30 years. “In a coppice system, the roots remain alive and productive for hundreds of years,” says Berrizbeitia. “Historian Oliver Rackham refers to this phenomenon as the ‘Constant Spring.’” Coppiced trees in England have survived for two thousand years and hold in their trunks valuable information about the past. Kofman and Jarman note that coppices “of all kinds and ages are of interest for their associated wildlife and for their cultural heritage.” Some plant and animal species need the “open spaces…, edge habitats and alternate light and shade conditions” that coppices, as opposed to the thick overstories tall trees, provide.

In attempting to transform an agricultural forest into a recreational one, Charles Eliot confronted questions about what makes a forest and how cultures are reflected in those landscapes.

 

Thousands of years before colonists arrived in New England, the Massachusett nation inhabited the region we refer to as “The Blue Hills.” In fact, “Massachusett” means “people of the Great Hills.” For 8,000 years before European contact in the 1600s, the indigenous nation farmed corn, squash, and beans; used trees for their fuel, wetus, and canoes; and, says Berrizbeitia, “walked through the valleys on their way to the Neponset River, to fish and to transport material to the shore, or to return to their fields of corn in the meadows of Quincy, or to their village on the borders of Ponkapoag bog.” They had access to wild game for meat and furs, as well as valuable mines from which, for thousands of years, they drew granite and “rhyolite, a volcanic rock with high silica content” to “make sharp tools and spears.”

When European colonists arrived in 1620, like all tribes along the east coast, the Massachusett had just suffered through a plague, and, in the decades that followed, struggled to maintain their lands in the face of the thousands of Europeans who arrived on their shores. They were removed from the Blue Hills to Ponkapoag, where, today, they write, “we continue to survive as Massachusett people because we have retained the oral tradition of storytelling just as our ancestors did.”

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, settlers clear-cut the forests, taking first the white pines, whose strong trunks made excellent sailboat masts. They turned over thousands of New England acres of rocky soil, built stone walls to mark their property, and planted crops to feed the colonies— often with the forced labor of enslaved Africans and indigenous people whose land the colonists stole.

Berrizbeitia surmises that, in the late 1800s, Eliot knew about the Epping Forest in England, where pollarded trees (created in the same way as coppices, but cut higher up their trunks) had been harvested for centuries and inspired a debate among residents and experts: Should the coppiced trees remain or be removed? What should this new forest look like? Designer and social activist William Morris argued that the coppices represented an important part of the cultural history of the region, and vehemently opposed biologist Alfred Russell Wallace’s proposal to import trees from other nations (including the US and China) to help diversify the English forest. This first attempt to apply biogeographic diversity to design was rejected, and the pollarded trees remained. They can be found there today, in tall clusters, evidence of the forest’s history.

In the Blue Hills, says Berrizbeitia, Eliot noticed seedlings growing between the coppices. He knew that, if left to its own devices, the forest would regenerate. He was right—but, frequent forest fires prevented the natural regeneration of the forest.

The Massachusetts government decided they had to intervene. “They realized, ‘we devastated our soils with agriculture.’ What’s going to happen to us?” To jumpstart a new succession cycle, as the regeneration process is called, they planted white pines in large numbers, adding over one and a half million in the Blue Hills. This is a practice the US forest service continues today, planting pines and other trees throughout the US, an aspect of silviculture—a word coined in the late nineteenth century, when Eliot was hard at work on the park system.

All along the outskirts of Boston, the lands Eliot developed into the Metropolitan Park system were full of coppiced forests, the primary source of fuel in the area until the transition to coal took place in the 1880s. Instead of remnant wilderness, these were fallowlands, abandoned forests that needed to be put to a different use. He likely began his project to remove the coppiced trees, Berrizbeitia theorizes, but soon enough, the gypsy moth and chestnut blight took hold in the area, killing the coppiced trees. Thousands of new trees—a variety of species—were brought in from nearby nurseries, and when those failed, more were planted. Berrizbeitia is now researching the infrastructure that drove the transformation of the Blue Hills—including where those millions of pine seedlings were cultivated, and how they were transported and stored.

She argues that Eliot’s proposal to remove the coppiced trees was an attempt to erase the imprint of settler’s colonization of the Massachusett people’s land, and that although he knew the importance of the hills to the indigenous nation, he did nothing to recognize them beyond the naming of landmarks.

In the face of the current environmental crisis that requires a transition from fossil fuels to renewable and diverse energy sources, coppicing has reentered the conversation on sustainable resources. Combined with other energy sources, such as solar and wind power, says Berrizbeitia, it’s possible that harvesting lumber with coppicing techniques could become another energy resource. Although still widely used in Europe, coppicing is now experiencing a revival in the US. Berrizbeitia’s research on the Blue Hills restores to the region the story of a designed forest whose history might help us move into an uncertain future with more tools at hand.

 

The GSD Community Feels at Home in the Smithsonian Design Triennial

Challenging and wide-ranging conceptions of “home” underpin the design projects on view at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. The seventh edition of the recurring survey of contemporary design practices, Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial features 25 site-specific projects, all new commissions, that reconceptualize “design’s role in shaping the physical and emotional realities” associated with home. Faculty, alumni, and affiliates of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) are core participants in the exhibition, which investigates the historical power dynamics and contemporary political economies that structure domestic space. Michelle Joan Wilkinson , a 2020 Loeb Fellow and curator of architecture and design at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, DC, organized the exhibition with a team led by co-curators Alexandra Cunningham Cameron and Christina L. De León. Isabel Strauss, a 2021 MArch I graduate and curatorial assistant at NMAAHC, also worked as a curatorial assistant on Making Home.

The theme of the triennial was especially apt given its setting. The Cooper Hewitt occupies the former residence of Gilded Age steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. The grandiose turn-of-the-century mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side often serves as a foil for triennial projects that propose more democratic ideals of domesticity. This rethinking begins with the exhibition design by Johnston Marklee, the firm led by GSD design critics in architecture Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee. Tasked with negotiating the public mission of a Smithsonian institution, the historic private home that serves as the setting, and the domestic themes of the triennial, Johnston Marklee’s interventions aim to “dismantle the social and spatial hierarchies built into the mansion’s architecture,” according to a gallery text. Accessible, cushioned seating creates inviting spaces amid the imposing halls.  Expansive area rugs with bold geometric patterns recalling linoleum floors playfully exaggerate the scale of the interior spaces, while wood veneer exhibition furniture, evoking everyday cabinetry, contrasts with the mansion’s ornate carved-wood details.

The installation “Ebb + Flow” by Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE) , part of the exhibition’s first section, “Going Home,” feels subtly integrated into the mansion’s glass-enclosed conservatory even as it foregrounds historically marginalized perspectives. Germane Barnes, winner of the 2021 Wheelwright Prize and an alumnus of the AIRIE program, designed listening stations with headphones that visitors can use to hear a soundscape that includes recordings of Everglades preservation advocates Daniel Tommie (Seminole Tribe of Florida), Dinizulu Gene Tinnie, and Dr. Wallis Tinnie. Now threatened by development, the Everglades are a unique ecological system and the site of Indigenous cultural traditions, scenes of which adorn cushions that line the room. The sculptural objects Barnes created for the listening stations are “inspired by the Freedman lineage of movement and resourcefulness,” a reference to the African American communities that found freedom from slavery in the Everglades and other marshy locations beyond the reach of plantation owners.

The AIRIE project was one of several in the exhibition that feature Indigenous perspectives on home environments. In the exhibition’s first gallery, a display of vibrant turkey-feather capes, by the Lenape Center with Joe Baker, serves as an opening acknowledgement of the Lenape people as stewards of the land on which the museum sits. On the museum’s top floor, in the exhibition’s “Making Home” section, Indigenous building practices from the Hawaiian Islands inform “Hālau Kūkulu Hawaiʻi: A Home That Builds Multitudes,” a project by After Oceanic Built Environments Lab , led by 2015 MDes graduate Sean Connelly, in collaboration with Leong Leong Architecture. The designers employ the lashing techniques of canoe construction (wa‘a) to create the structure of a large hale, or traditional building. An accompanying video details how the structure and building techniques are grounded in the Native Hawaiian concept of ʻāina, or land “that which feeds.”

In a nearby gallery, “We:sic ’em ki: (Everybody’s Home)” by Terrol Dew Johnson and ArandaLasch, to which GSD 2010 MArch alum Joaquin Bonifaz contributed, demonstrated how traditional building, craft, and culinary techniques of the American Southwest informed the design of a home for the Tohono O’odham Nation.

Several of the participants in Making Home also contributed to the GSD’s 2023 Black in Design Conference , “The Black Home,” an event that anticipated some of the triennial’s themes. For example, Barnes participated in the keynote panel discussion while Curry J. Hackett, a 2024 MAUD graduate, led a workshop on “Archiving the Black Home.” At the Cooper Hewitt, Hackett and Wayside Studio present “So That You All Won’t Forget: Speculations on a Black Home in Rural Virginia,” part of the triennial’s “Seeking Home” section that includes projects offering utopian gestures and imaginative perspectives. Hackett’s project becomes apparent first through its aroma: he has lined a gallery with curing tobacco leaves. Amid the bunches of tobacco are “speculative objects,” including an decorated church fan and a painting by his mother. The project is a meditation on tobacco farming in Hackett’s family history –“an unlikely celebration of an otherwise haunting crop”—and the designer’s personal “speculation on what life on the land was like or could be.”

This kind of speculation can drive tangible proposals on how the basic concept of home can serve to address social inequality. Led by 2013 Loeb fellow Deanna Van Buren , Designing Justice + Designing Space produced “The Architecture of Re-entry” an installation that includes tidy enclosures, each featuring a Murphy bed, workspace, exercise equipment, and a small library. The cubicle-like interiors could be full-scale mock-ups of dorm rooms, but Van Buren’s project aims to offer a sense of stability to those who need it most, focusing on transitional housing for formerly incarcerated people. The semi-private living spaces are envisioned as elements within larger open structures that include space for supportive programs and shared facilities. The proposition is that a well-designed space, however modest, can have life-changing effects as a source of attachment and dignity.

The notion of “home” that emerges from the triennial is an unsettled, contested category. Within the museum’s purview of “the United States, US Territories, and Tribal Nations,” vastly different meanings of domesticity coexist. A source of strength, identity, and comfort, home can also represent profound loss and estrangement. In surveying contemporary designers who grapple with the dynamics of private space, Making Home effectively prompts a public discourse about what might be shared in collective visions for home while also making visible the real divisions still to be addressed.

The Renovated Gund Hall: A Paradigm for the Revitalization of Mid-Twentieth-Century Architecture

Harvard Graduate School of Design students returned for the fall 2024 semester to find Gund Hall transformed. Yet the iconic building looked much the same as it had since opening a half century ago. And this was indeed the point. Over the summer, a meticulously planned renovation enhanced the facility’s energy performance, sustainability, and accessibility while conserving its original design. Led by Bruner/Cott Architects, this project has transformed Gund Hall into a paradigm for the rehabilitation and stewardship of mid-twentieth-century architecture.

Designed by Australian architect John Andrews (MArch ’58), Gund Hall opened in 1972 to house Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). Since this time, the building’s glass-enclosed five-story studio block, known as the trays, has served as the GSD’s physical and metaphorical center—where students work, interact, and exchange ideas. The trays have been quite successful as a workspace and social condenser, as Andrews envisioned, but less so in terms of environmental consciousness and user comfort. Single-pane glazing and minimally insulated exposed concrete, commonplace at the time of construction and used by Andrews in a forward-thinking fashion, ultimately made the building difficult to heat and cool. Studies preceding the renovation revealed that the trays, which account for 28 percent of Gund Hall’s floor area, were responsible for 46 percent of the building’s energy consumption.

Alongside these financial and environmental costs came a very human one: within the trays, students experienced thermal conditions that ranged from sweltering heat to hand-numbing cold, all while grappling with glare from direct and reflected sunlight and leaks from the stepped roof.  Andrews’s experimental design gave rise to an impressive building marked by vulnerabilities that future generations, with access to advanced technologies, needed to address.

David Fixler, lecturer in architecture at the GSD, is chair of the Building Committee, which consists of faculty representing the school’s three core disciplines and oversees the renovation project. According to Fixler, the idea to upgrade the trays’ glazing “had been in and out of the GSD’s eye for the better part of two decades.” The past five years saw the envelope project “revived with a strong emphasis on comfort, energy efficiency, and larger sustainability goals to prove that a building like Gund Hall,” which predates contemporary energy-conservation concerns, “can be made a more environmentally friendly place.” This was a complicated proposition, however, as the renovation’s mandate was to improve Gund Hall’s energy efficiency while acknowledging the stewardship value in conserving Andrews’s original design. In addition, as Fixler noted, “Harvard is a place known for innovation and great design, and we wanted to reflect that as well.”

To develop a realistic scope for the summer renovation—itself the first phase of a multi-year renovation project—the Building Committee worked closely with Boston-based Bruner/Cott Architects, specialists in historic preservation. Project architect George Gard, associate at Bruner/Cott and GSD alumnus (MAUD ’14), noted that the design team’s focus rested on “two main pillars: conserving Gund Hall, and making its facade world-leading in performance.” Harnessing the technology to create a first-rate facade, Gard clarified, was “the easy part; the hard part was understanding the building’s conservation value and marrying the technology to it” while meeting strict dimensional parameters for the glazing members. Jason Jewhurst, Bruner/Cott principal-in-charge, offered an illustrative example, citing the design team’s decision to keep the 50-year-old facade support steel within the studio’s original glazing system. This move aligned with the building’s preservation and helped minimize carbon emissions, yet it also underscored a challenge applicable to much of the Gund Hall renovation: “how do we work with the existing fabric and elevate it with new technology?” Jewhurst asked. As Fixler observed, in the planning and design stages as well as in the field, “this project involved a lot of artistry.”

A primary achievement of the ambitious renovation, which followed a tight construction schedule initiated after commencement in May, involves the replacement of the glass encasing the trays. In total, this amounts to 1,617 glazing units equaling a glazed area of 15,475 square feet. The east curtain wall and clerestory windows employ triple-pane glass, while a custom hybrid vacuum-insulated glass (VIG) composite contributes an additional layer of insulation to the north and south curtain walls. By leveraging the insulating properties of the internal vacuum and marrying it to an additional layer of conventional insulating glass in a sandwich that is overall only a few millimeters thicker than conventional double glazing, the hybrid VIG offers unprecedented thermal resistance. These hybrid units can deliver energy performance that is two to four times better than standard insulating glass and up to ten times more efficient than single-pane glass. While this technology has developed a strong track record in Europe, the Gund Hall renovation is among the first projects in the United States to employ hybrid VIG on a grand scale.

Through choice of glass and special coatings, the reglazing project markedly enhances the balance, distribution, and quality of light within the studio, which is augmented by improvements such as the installation of motorized window shades to help mitigate glare and heat gain from direct and reflected sunlight, and upgraded under-tray lighting for better illumination. Widened exits to the terraces make these outdoor spaces wheelchair accessible for the first time in Gund Hall’s history. In addition, the construction team repaired areas of deteriorating concrete on building’s exterior.

In terms of sustainability, the renovation of Gund Hall exceeds Massachusetts’s stretch energy code for alterations, rendering the building a step above the base code in terms of energy efficiency. Calculations project that, moving forward, the renovated building will save approximately 18,000kg of CO2 emissions per year, resulting in a nine-year carbon payback for the project. Gund Hall will see a 22.2 percent reduction in energy use intensity and a 19.1 percent reduction in utility costs.

Of equal significance to these outcomes are the improvements in user friendliness that stem from the renovation. Not only will everyone be able to access the trays’ outdoor terraces, but “for the first time in over 50 years, the trays will be warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and we won’t have rain leaking onto our desks,” proclaimed Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture. Indeed, alongside the upgrades to the building’s efficiency and sustainability, these qualitative enhancements position Gund Hall as a model for the conservation and revitalization of mid-twentieth-century modern architecture.

“When John Andrews was originally tasked to design a new facility for the Departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design,” Whiting noted, “he surprised his clients with a unique building that was at once solid and transparent and that prioritized the student body, united within an enormous, light-filled, single space. Though much has changed since Gund Hall first opened in 1972,” she continued, “the careful rehabilitation of the structure underscores the school’s commitment to this same priority: our students.”

 

Project Team:

• Bruner/Cott Architects – Design and Executive Architect (Prime Consultant)
  • Jason Jewhurst, FAIA (Principal-in-Charge)
  • George H. Gard, AIA, Associate (Project Architect)
  • Henry Moss, AIA, LEED AP (Consulting Principal for Preservation & Design)
  • Mridula Swaminathan, Assoc. AIA (Project Designer)

• SGH – Building Envelope Consultant, Structural Engineer
• Redgate – Owners Project Manager
• Lam Partners – Daylighting Consultant
• Vanderweil Engineers – Sustainability, Electrical Engineer, Mechanical Engineer
• Kalin – Specifications
• Jensen Hughes – Building and Accessibility Code
• Heintges – BECx
• Shawmut Design and Construction – Construction Manager
• A&A Window Products – Glazier (Key Sub-Contractor)
• Oldcastle Building Envelope (OBE 360) – Curtain Wall and IGU Fabricator (Key Supplier)
• Vitro – VIG, Glass Substrate, and Glass Coating Supplier (Key Supplier)

 

GSD Building Committee Faculty Members:

• David Fixler, Lecturer in Architecture and chair of the Building Committee
• Anita Berrizbeitia, Professor of Landscape Architecture
• Gary Hilderbrand, Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture and chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture
• Grace La, Professor of Architecture and chair of the Department of Architecture
• Mark Lee, Professor in Practice of Architecture
• Rahul Mehrotra, Professor of Urban Design and Planning and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization
• Farshid Moussavi, Professor in Practice of Architecture
• Holly Samuelson, Associate Professor of Architecture
• Ron Witte, Professor in Residence of Architecture

GSD Alumni Involvement:

• George H. Gard, AIA, Associate, Bruner/Cott Architects, MAUD ’14
• Henry Moss, AIA, Consulting Principal, Bruner/Cott Architects, MArch ’70
• LeeAnn Suen, AIA, Architect, Bruner/Cott Architects (Former), MArch ’17
• Whitney Hansley, AIA, Assistant Project Manager, Redgate (Former), MArch ’16
• Dan Weissmann, AIA, IALD, IES, Associate Principal, Lam Partners, MDes ’12
• Royce Perez, Associate, Heintges (Former), MArch ’17
• Holly Samuelson, AIA, LEED AP, GSD Building Committee Member, DDes
• Farshid Moussavi, ARB, RIBA, RA, GSD Building Committee Member, MArch II ’91
• Gary Hilderbrand, FASLA, FAAR, GSD Building Committee Member, MLA ’85
• Mark Wai Tak Lee, AIA, GSD Building Committee Member (Former), MArch ’95
• Grace La, AIA, GSD Building Committee Member, MArch ’95
• Rahul Mehrotra, GSD Building Committee Member, MAUD ’87

 

A New Way of Seeing: The Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis

In 1965, as students protested the escalating war in Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, and the federal government sought to revive faltering cities through urban renewal programs, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design launched a groundbreaking initiative: the Laboratory for Computer Graphics. Over the next quarter century, this multidisciplinary research group developed programs for automated mapping and spatial analysis that changed the ways we understand and create the world around us, from forecasting the weather to designing buildings. The lab served as an incubator for computer-based technologies that pervade all aspects of contemporary life—including the ability to avoid traffic back-ups, courtesy of the now-standard mapping software in today’s vehicles.

Origins: Howard Fisher and SYMAP

Howard T. Fisher was no stranger to Harvard. He had earned his undergraduate degree there in the mid-1920s and then studied architecture at the school, prior to the advent of the Graduate School of Design (GSD). Fisher, who for a time specialized in prefabricated housing and commercial architecture, was a versatile designer; a colleague would later describe him as “a complete architect, planner, master builder, inventor, environmental scientist, teacher, and scholar . . . truly a Renaissance man of the 20^th century.”¹ Yet, those who knew Fisher best characterized him, above all, as a problem solver—a trait that prompted his return to Harvard in 1965.

In the decade following World War II, the flipside of American prosperity was urban turmoil. People with means abandoned the city, opting instead for suburban life. Businesses soon followed, leaving in their wake empty downtown commercial districts, deteriorating neighborhoods, and substandard living conditions. Cities were in crisis, and the search was on for potential solutions, many of which drew on the era’s developing technologies—including the computer. It was in this cultural milieu that Fisher, practicing and teaching in Chicago in the early 1960s, devised a software program to create legible maps from complex data.

Fisher’s creation, named SYMAP (short for Synagraphic Mapping System), was conceived as “a new way of seeing things together as a whole.”² In other words, SYMAP could analyze information from many sources and present it so that relationships were readily visible to planners, designers, or anyone. Furthermore, while earlier software programs required users to physically assemble the layers of a thematic map (essentially a map that tells a story about a place), SYMAP used a computer to create an entire thematic map, representing data by using contour lines, shading, patterns, and eventually color. To create such a map, the programmer manually keypunched data on cards, brought them to a computing center for processing, and returned for the printout hours or days later.³ In the mid-1960s, Harvard had a single computer for such purposes; registered users were permitted one visit per day, and due to processing time, it could take up to a month to produce a single map.⁴ Nevertheless, SYMAP’s ability to synthesize material and generate information-laden maps was an improvement, both in the sophistication of analysis and the time required to create such maps sans computer.

Given the precarious state of American cities at the time, SYMAP’s potential applications in the realm of planning and design offered great promise.⁵ This appealed to the philanthropic Ford Foundation, which sought to further the public welfare by “identify[ing] and contribut[ing] to the solution of problems of national and international importance.”⁶ Foundation officials signaled that they would be open to funding Fisher’s continued research, however he first needed a university to house this research. Fisher thus turned to his alma mater, where he found a champion in Harvard GSD dean Josep Lluís Sert.

Fisher and SYMAP relocated to Harvard in February 1965 where, within the GSD, he established the Laboratory for Computer Graphics (LCG).⁷ That fall, through the GSD’s Department of City and Regional Planning, he submitted a proposal to the Ford Foundation, which promised $294,000 (equivalent to nearly $3 million today) “for research and training in the use of computers to make maps of social and economic features of cities.” This grant to the GSD, to run through 1969, formed part of a larger effort to address the ongoing crisis in American cities by, as the foundation characterized it, “harness[ing] computer-based analysis to the study of urban problems.”⁸ Subsequent funding for the LCG would come from a variety of sources, including the sale of proprietary software; correspondence courses, professional development seminars, and conferences; local and federal government contracts; and grants from institutions such as the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.

Early Years

Major funding in hand, Fisher wasted little time in attracting attention—and talented researchers—to the LCG, launching an ambitious lecture series in April 1966. Held weekly throughout the spring and fall semesters that year, these meetings attracted participants from throughout Harvard and beyond. Regular attendees, dubbed “Computer Graphics Aficionados,” engaged with distinguished speakers from many disciplines, including geography, cartography, engineering, economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, classics, transportation and city planning, urban design, and landscape architecture.⁹

Mathematical geographer William Warntz, known for population analyses of social and economic patterns, spoke at an Aficionados session on the topic of statistical surfaces. Warntz soon became a key figure in the LCG, leaving his position with the American Geographical Society to join the GSD in 1966 as professor of theoretical geography and regional planning, and the LCG’s associate director. When Fisher retired two years later, Warntz moved into the role of director and added “Spatial Analysis” to the group’s name, signaling the lab’s expanding focus. Thus, from 1968 on, the organization was officially known as the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis.

In fall 1966, geographer and urban planner Allan Schmidt was featured at an Aficionados meeting, where he discussed the role of computer mapping in the planning process. Shortly thereafter Fisher persuaded Schmidt to leave his position at Michigan State University and assume a new post at the LCG, starting in spring 1967. For the next 15 years, Schmidt remained at the lab in various capacities, including director (1971–1975) and executive director (1975–1982).

Another key figure who took part in the LCG’s formative years is Carl Steinitz, now Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning Emeritus at the GSD. Steinitz traced his involvement to a fortuitous 1965 encounter with Fisher, where Steinitz—then a graduate student in city and regional planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—learned of SYMAP. With Fisher’s tutelage, Steinitz used SYMAP to analyze and map data for his doctoral thesis, which explored Central Boston’s urban features in relation to his advisor Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960).¹⁰ In 1966, Steinitz accepted a joint post at the GSD: assistant professor in the Departments of Landscape Architecture and City and Regional Planning, and research associate at the LCG.¹¹ He would stay with the lab through 1972.

By the end of the 1966–67 academic year, the lab employed 29 people, including GSD graduate students, Harvard undergrads, and experts from many fields. Staff numbers would fluctuate in the coming years, depending on specific research projects and funding. Despite being an organization within the GSD, the LCG was housed for its first seven years not in Robinson or Hunt Halls, but in the basement of adjacent Memorial Hall. In 1972, the lab joined the rest of the GSD across the street in the newly completed Gund Hall, occupying space on the 5^th floor.

Research and Outreach

Fifty years after its founding, Steinitz described the LCG’s early research as falling into two basic categories. The first stemmed from SYMAP, involving “investigations into computer graphic representation of spatially and temporally distributed data.”¹² This research included time-series maps of a storm’s progression, three-dimensional data displays, and maps that conveyed large data sets, such as early census maps for New Haven, Connecticut.

The lab’s second area of inquiry, according to Steinitz, “related to city and regional planning, landscape architecture and architecture, focused on the role of computers in programming, design, evaluation and simulation.”¹³ These efforts included research that drew on SYMAP and other programs to analyze data—such as a region’s possible uses, resources, and vulnerabilities—and generate models to assess future land-use impacts, which could in turn guide design and development decisions. This methodology, envisioned by Steinitz in 1967 to apply computer analysis and mapping to environmental planning, is today widely known as geodesign.

In tandem with its research and development activities, the LCG circulated its work through a variety of means. The lab sold SYMAP and later programs commercially, with nearly 1000 practitioners throughout the world participating in the lab’s correspondence training course, initiated in 1966. Beginning the following year, the LCG staged conferences, some for researchers and others for a broad audience that encompassed corporate and government employees—including from General Motors, Bell Laboratories, Anaheim Police Department, and the US House of Representatives. Branded as Harvard Computer Graphics Week, this renowned five-day conference occurred annually between 1978 and 1983, drawing up to 500 participants its final year.¹⁴

Highlighting Harvard Computer Graphics Week’s disciplinary breadth, a program for the 1981 session noted that participants would learn “how computer graphics is being used to solve problems in corporate planning and management, marketing, energy exploration and distribution, physical design, natural resource management, city and regional planning, education, research, financial management, and many other areas.”¹⁵ And for those unable to attend this or other meetings, the LCG issued and sold the conference papers for all six years in the 19-volume publication Harvard Library of Computer Graphics.

Legacy

The LCG continued operation throughout the 1980s, albeit at a greatly reduced capacity due to shifting priorities and changes in GSD

leadership. The lab ultimately disbanded in 1991, leaving an impact that well exceeds its relatively brief existence.¹⁶ Through the development of cutting-edge software packages and a robust outreach program, the LCG introduced computer graphics and spatial analysis to a host of disciplines—including architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. In addition, the lab acted as an incubator for innovation, providing “many of today’s essential ideas and early versions of tools now embedded in GIS [geographic information systems], remote sensing, geospatial science, geodesign, and online culture.¹⁷ Finally, the LCG served as a training ground for researchers who, following their time at the lab, went on to develop life-altering computer-based technologies. For example, the architectural software used throughout design professions today is grounded in the LCG’s work, as are four-dimensional holograms and digital mapping.

Among the LCG’s renowned former members are Jack and Laura Dangermond, then a GSD landscape architecture student and a social scientist, respectively. The Dangermonds spent a year in the late 1960s working in the LCG, which Jack recently described as “a place that shaped the rest of my life.”¹⁸ After Jack’s graduation from the GSD (MLA ’69), the Dangermonds returned to his hometown of Redlands, California, and cofounded the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri), building on their experience at the LCG. Today Esri is a global leader in GIS software, location intelligence, and digital mapping.

In 2015, Dangermond and other participants from the LCG’s heyday joined with contemporary researchers for a two-day conference entitled The Lab for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis and Its Legacy, organized to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the LCG’s founding.¹⁹ Mohsen Mostafavi, then GSD dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design, offered introductory remarks that situated the lab and its contributions as “part and parcel of our history.”²⁰ This holds true not only for the GSD, where spatial mapping software is the cornerstone of many research studios, but for daily life in general. As we navigate city streets with the digital maps on our phones or learn about election results in precinct-by-precinct detail, we rely on LCG-derived technologies. As Mostafavi suggested, far from a bygone entity, the LCG endures as “a vision for the future.”²¹

 *Unless otherwise noted, all images are courtesy of the Special Collections, Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design.

 

1. Leonard J. Currie, “Digest of the Career and Achievements of Howard T. Fisher,” sponsorship letter for Fisher AIA Fellowship application, c. 1974, https://web.archive.org/web/20150105113516/http://public.aia.org/sites/hdoaa/wiki/AIA%20scans/F-H/Fisher_Howard.pdf. ↩︎
2. Nick Chrisman, Charting the Unknown: How Computer Mapping at Harvard Became GIS (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2006), 20. For a detailed discussion of SYMAP, see chapter 2. ↩︎
3. Evangelos Kotsioris, “The Computer Misfits: The Rise and Fall of the Pioneering Laboratory for Computer Graphics,” in Radical Pedagogies, eds. Beatriz Colomina et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022). An excerpt of this article appears in The MIT Press Reader, https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-computer-misfits-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-pioneering-laboratory-for-computer-graphics/. ↩︎
4. Carl Steinitz, “The Beginnings of Geographical Information Systems: A Personal Historical Perspective,” Planning Perspectives 29, no. 2 (2014): 239–254, doi:10.1080/02665433.2013.860762. ↩︎
5. A recent MoMA show, Emerging Ecologies, included a four-dimensional model derived from SYMAP’s output as an example of a pioneering approach to visualizing complex data about the environment. See Carson Chan and Matthew Wagstaffe, Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism (New York: MoMA, 2023), 70–71. ↩︎
6. Ford Foundation, The Ford Foundation Annual Report 1966 (New York, NY: Ford Foundation, 1966), mission statement, https://www.fordfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/1966-annual-report.pdf. ↩︎
7. Matthew W. Wilson, “Celebrating the Advent of Digital Mapping,” ArcNews, Esri, Winter 2015, https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/arcnews/celebrating-the-advent-of-digital-mapping/. Chrisman’s summarization of the LCG’s founding provides a slightly different ordering of events. See Chrisman, Charting the Unknown, 3. ↩︎
8. Ford Foundation, Annual Report 1966, 7. ↩︎
9. Chrisman, Charting the Unknown, 10–11. ↩︎
10. Carl Steinitz, “Meaning and the Congruence of Urban Form and Activity,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 34, no. 4 (July 1968): 223–247. ↩︎
11. Steinitz, “Beginnings of Geographical Information Systems.” ↩︎
12. Ibid. ↩︎
13. Ibid. ↩︎
14. Chrisman, Charting the Unknown, 158. ↩︎
15. Harvard GSD Lab for Computer Graphics, brochure for Harvard Computer Graphics Week ’81, July 26-31, 1981, https://www.vasulka.org/archive/ExhTWO/Harvard/general.pdf. ↩︎
16. The author thanks Martin Bechthold, Bruce Boucek, Stephen Erwin, Carl Steinitz, and Charles Waldheim for their willingness to be interviewed about the lab and its legacy. For more on the lab’s last decade and dissolution, see Chrisman, Charting the Unknown, chapter 11. ↩︎
17. Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis, The Lab for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis and its Legacy, conference program, April 30 through May 1, 2015, https://cga-download.hmdc.harvard.edu/publish_web/CGA_Conferences/2015_Lab_Legacy/2015_CGA_Conference_Program.pdf. ↩︎
18. In a recent article, Jack Dangermond wrote about his formative time in the lab. See Jack Dangermond, “How the Geographic Information System May Help Make the World Better,” Forbes, Oct. 8, 2024, https://www.forbes.com/sites/esri/2024/10/08/how-the-geographic-information-system-may-help-make-the-world-better/. ↩︎
19. The conference was hosted by the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA), established in 2006 to support the use of GIS in research and teaching across the university. As such, the CGA acts as a successor of sorts to the LCG. ↩︎
20. Mohsen Mostafavi, “Welcome & Introduction,” talk at The Lab for Computer Graphic and Spatial Analysis and Its Legacy, April 30, 2015, https://vimeo.com/128158780?autoplay=1&muted=1&stream_id=Y2xpcHN8MTMxODA5NTR8aWQ6ZGVzY3xbXQ%3D%3D. ↩︎
21. Ibid. ↩︎

Can a National Housing Policy Solve the Affordability Crisis in Cities?

In the United States, where over 80 percent of the population lives in cities, a national housing plan is a housing plan for cities. Housing shortages are pervasive across the country—Zillow has estimated a 4.5-million-unit shortage nationwide. And while they are especially acute in coastal metropolitan areas, like Portland or Boston, even markets in the middle of the country, like Austin and Denver, have deep housing deficits . Renters, who are often more vulnerable to the winds of housing market fluctuations, tend to make up more than 50 percent of residents in cities . Right now nearly half of all renters pay more than 30 percent of their income on housing and the number of unsheltered individuals has ticked up since the pandemic by nearly 16 percent. The housing crisis is so severe that it cannot be properly addressed without the heft of federal financing. Solving the problem requires a scale of resources that cities just don’t have on their own.

For cities, demand for housing is typically not the problem—people flock towards cities for jobs, amenities, and services. Rather, the root of the affordability crisis is the lack of housing supply. Housing takes time and great resources to produce at the scale needed to relieve pressure on prices. That is why mayors all over the country are keeping a close eye on the national housing platforms proposed by the presidential candidates.  They’re making calculations and plans for how their locality can leverage this reinvigorated commitment from the federal government. For example, Vice President Kamala Harris’s proposal to expand the Low-Income Housing Tax credit and to open up other tax incentives to spur the development of housing, especially in distressed markets, should serve urban localities and their surrounding metro areas very well. Former President Donald Trump’s proposals are less forthcoming with details, but also mention tax incentives for first-time homebuyers. However, his strategy would only help affordability in cities if more supply is simultaneously built in the same location to absorb the people who want to transition from renting to ownership.

The fanfare of a national housing policy, however, should be tempered by the fact that most contemporary housing policy in the US is actually formulated and implemented by states and local municipalities. Zoning is perhaps the most important determinant of where, how much, and what kind of housing gets planned and produced. And zoning is squarely under local jurisdiction (where municipalities operate within the context of rules set by the states). The federal government has very few levers over local land use and zoning. It has been documented time and time again that restrictive land use regulations are one of the most notorious drivers of sluggish housing production and increasing housing costs . This is particularly true when looking at the under-supply of denser rental, multi-family housing (the type of housing most likely to constitute the more affordable stock for lower- and moderate-income households).

So how do the proposed national housing plans take into account this particular supply crisis in the context of US cities? For the most part, proposals from both candidates are a-spatial—there is no clear recognition of where, geographically, more housing is needed to address the affordability crisis. Both Harris and Trump talk about using federally owned lands to build new housing, but much of that land is far from high-cost cities.

Both Harris and Trump recognize the procedural and regulatory barriers to increasing housing supply at the local level. Harris has proposed a $40 billion “innovation fund” to support local strategies for building and financing housing production. Much of the (evidence-based) logic behind these ideas is that any supply, even market-rate units, will help to relieve excessive housing costs across the board. Trump’s policy details have been thin in this area as well, and his remarks have often focused on environmental regulations rather than density-related zoning codes. The biggest concern for any proposal, however, is that housing and land use regulations are so heterogeneous and particular to specific localities. It is hard to imagine how federal rules can be both nationally applicable and targeted enough to disrupt the city-specific regimes that have constrained housing production for decades.

A national housing platform is long overdue, and let’s hope it remains at the top of the national agenda after the election campaigns transition into governance and policymaking. However, it’s crucial that local municipalities keep their eyes on the prize: if any federal initiatives are to move the needle at the local level, there still needs to be a serious reckoning among city officials and planners around where and how much housing gets built. Local governments often come up against “unfunded mandates”—policies or regulations imposed without the financial resources to implement them effectively. We may be in the opposite situation: a renewed federal commitment to funding and incentivizing housing affordability, but in the context of stubborn local roadblocks that prevent it from being fully realized. Local municipalities will need to keep doing the hard work of making sure resources flow from the perch of the federal government to the foundations of new and abundant housing.

Rachel Meltzer, PhD, is the Plimpton Associate Professor of Planning and Urban Economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. 

An Interview with Jay Wickersham: The Architecture and Legacy of H. H. Richardson

Foremost among nineteenth-century American architects stands H. H. Richardson. While most frequently associated with his Romanesque-inspired Trinity Church (1872–77) in Boston, Richardson’s reach extends far beyond this rusticated masonry masterpiece.

Richardson’s oeuvre, accomplished during a relatively brief life (he died at age 47), contains a wealth of remarkable buildings that creatively fuse varied inspirations—European and American, historical and contemporary, natural and technological. His work established a foundation for modern architecture and influenced succeeding generations of architects, including Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Furthermore, his collaborative studio served as a training ground for the many promising young architects, such as Charles McKim and Stanford White, who later joined William Mead to establish the firm of McKim, Mead & White; and George Shepley, who carried the mantle of Richardson’s studio after the older architect’s death.

By virtue of his education, social relationships, and built work, Richardson maintained deep connections with Harvard University. Now, with Monacelli’s release of Henry Hobson Richardson: Drawings from the Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University , an additional touchpoint between the architect and university comes to light. This new publication, coauthored by Jay Wickersham (MArch ’84), Chris Milford, and Hope Mayo, reveals the richness and breadth of Richardson’s studio’s work. In advance of the book’s launch , marked by an event at Harvard’s Lamont Library on October 29, 2024, the GSD’s Krista Sykes talked with Wickersham about his own connections to Harvard and how this ambitious book came to exist.

Wickersham first learned of Richardson as a Yale University undergraduate in the mid-1970s, through the courses and writings of historian Vincent Scully. By the mid-1980s, after completing his architectural studies at the GSD, Wickersham started making trips with his colleague and soon-to-be collaborator Chris Milford to the Massachusetts town of North Easton, home to five buildings that Richardson had designed for the Ames family a century prior. Meanwhile, Wickersham earned a law degree from Harvard and began practicing design, construction, environmental, and land use law. A few decades later, while Wickersham was teaching a course on the history of professional practice at the GSD, he and Milford became active in Richardson-related preservation efforts. They also ramped up their research, coauthoring an article together about the continuation of Richardson’s practice after his death. These endeavors set the stage for the current debut of Henry Hobson Richardson: Drawings from the Collection of Houghton Library.

Krista Sykes: How did you decide to focus on Richardson’s drawings for this project?

Jay Wickersham: Through our earlier Richardson research and preservation work, we came to know Jim O’Gorman, the great expert on Richardson. In 2019, Jim suggested that we explore and publish, for the first time, Richardson’s archival drawings that are in Harvard’s Houghton Library. So Chris and I started working with our collaborator Hope Mayo. As the recently retired Philip Hofer Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts at Houghton Library, Hope was very familiar with the collection, and she brought a wealth of knowledge to our efforts.

It took us five years to go through the full collection. We looked at every single drawing. There were over 4,000 drawings with more than 100 projects represented. The material had been roughly cataloged by project. Yet within each project, the drawings were only gathered by type—plan, section, elevation, perspective, detail, or site plan. No efforts had been made to organize them according to the process of the design, which we set out to do.

This task was rather challenging because almost none of the drawings are dated, signed, or even initialed. We had to work from the evidence of the drawings themselves, starting at one end, if there were initial sketches by Richardson, and then from the other end, thinking about what the completed building looked like, making inferences to link drawings of similar style, looking at how the design had likely evolved. What could the drawings tell us about the course of design?

Furthermore, who made the drawings? Of the 4,000 drawings, only about 200 are from the hand of Richardson himself. In his collaborative studio, Richardson had a series of brilliant assistants, beginning with Charles McKim, followed by Stanford White, H. Langford Warren (who founded Harvard’s architecture program in 1893), Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, and then the last two, Charles Coolidge and George Shepley, who continued the firm after Richardson’s death. We examined outside evidence alongside the drawings themselves, trying to identify the hands involved.

A Richardsonian building is so recognizable. We wondered, though—how did he retain this consistent design approach and yet, at the same time, give opportunities to his assistants? We came to think of Richardson’s studio like a performing arts group, the way that the Duke Ellington Orchestra over time reflects different flavors of its namesake’s music, depending on a succession of brilliant soloists and collaborators.

Indeed, much of what Richardson was able to do stemmed from his close relationship with his collaborators. The Norcross brothers from Worcester, Massachusetts, who created the first major national construction company, built most of Richardson’s great buildings. He trusted them to do the detailing, and he allowed them some freedom in carrying out the design intent. Then there was John Evans, who had a decorative carving studio in Boston. Richardson’s drawings showed indications of the subjects for a building’s decorative carving program, allowing the Evans studio to carry them out with individuality and flair.

So the atelier model on which Richardson based his studio extends to his collaborators as well?

Very much so. He embraced the atelier model that Richardson experienced during his time at the École des Beaux-Arts. Yet he was equally imbued with the English Gothic Revival, with John Ruskin’s notion that decoration should derive from a building’s materials and methods of construction. Richardson also knew William Morris and his idea that the makers’ hands should be visible in the work. We view this as inherent with these collaborators, and even in the way that members of his studio could play with their own imagination in the buildings’ detailing. Our favorite element is for the Harvard Law School’s Austin Hall, where there are magnificent fireplaces in the classrooms. One day Richardson had a design charrette and asked everyone in the studio to design a set of andirons. There are 16 different andiron designs, each of them wonderfully playful. We’ve produced four of them in the book, another example of the richness that we’re trying to convey.

Could you say a bit about how you organized the material in the book?

In terms of essays, Jim has provided a framing article on Richardson’s biography, the large arc of his career, focusing on the design methods he learned at the École des Beaux-Arts. Chris and I have two essays: one is on the studio, how it operated, the key people within it, and the types of drawings it produced; the second is on Richardson’s clients and web of relationships, and his close friendships with Henry Adams and Frederick Law Olmsted, probably the two leading public intellectuals of post-Civil War America. Hope has written the first history of the archival collection, explaining its assemblage, how it got to Harvard, and all its diverse parts at Houghton and at the GSD’s Loeb Library. And for each building, we’ve provided a short introduction that outlines what to look for—a roadmap to the drawings.

With respect to drawings, the book highlights the scope of Richardson’s work, covered in a broad chronological arc from early to mid-period to late projects. And within that, we’ve organized it thematically, so you see how he tackled different building types and explored variations on a theme: major civic works, commercial office building, train stations, houses. Perhaps his greatest achievement is the series of five public libraries, where this new quintessentially democratic program is given a form that draws on European heritage and the American landscape. The extraordinary range and diversity in his work is something that we really wanted to convey.

How did Richardson’s archive come to Harvard?

Richardson was a Harvard undergraduate, class of 1859, and he later designed two major buildings for the campus—Sever Hall (1878–80) and Austin Hall (1880–84). Other people in the firm attended Harvard as well, and then the Shepley firm continued as the university’s architect up until the 1960s. But the firm kept the drawing collection in their own offices, which was in the Ames Building in downtown Boston.

Concerning the transfer of the archive to Harvard, there were two key events. First, after several decades of neglect, Richardson’s work gained renewed attention in the 1930s. Louis Mumford wrote about him in The Brown Decades of 1931, and then in 1936 Henry-Russell Hitchcock staged a show on Richardson at MoMA and published an accompanying monograph. These incidents brought Richardson back to prominence. And second, in 1942, Harvard opened Houghton Library, a state-of-the-art, climate-controlled library for rare books and manuscripts. So, the firm donated the entire collection of drawings to Houghton, where they have been ever since. They also gave over 50 albums of study photographs that the office had used for reference purposes, and Richardson’s surviving architectural library. The photo albums and the architectural library are at the Loeb Special Collections at the GSD.

There’s so much material in Richardson’s archive. How did you and your co-authors tackle it?

First, we consulted with Jim and did an initial pass. Then we started with the most prominent buildings that were the best documented and went back to fill in the additional ones. We also looked at high-quality reproductions of presentation drawings that Richardson’s office had made. Having done that, we did a rough cut for each building with two to three times the images we knew we could include. We then winnowed those down to our final cuts.

Next, we worked with the library to produce high-quality, full-color digital images of the selected drawings. In all, they account for just over 10 percent of the archive; about 450 drawings are in the book, plus several archival photographs. Those now exist as high-grade digital images for future scholars, who can use the book as a guide for going back into the archive.

Throughout the creation of the book, did anything stand out as a welcome surprise?

We’re quite happy that, through the design and reproduction process, the tactile quality of these fragile archival documents was retained. You can see the irregularities, the stains and creases and tears in the drawings, the different colors of background paper. The images allow you to see the designs themselves while still conveying the sense of these drawings as physical objects.

It was also fascinating to see the quality of the drawings, particularly when we got to the working drawings. They’re ink on vellum, with a soft watercolor wash on the back of the vellum to indicate materials—so gray for stone, pink for masonry, yellow for wood. The working drawings are in themselves very beautiful graphically.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Richardson no doubt saw his share of changing circumstances in terms of cultural shifts, scientific development, and more.

Oh, certainly. In fact, Richardson and the studio were very attuned to the latest technological innovations. The idea that he was just a masonry architect who was not technologically enterprising is a real misapprehension. In the drawings we found a lot of evidence to the contrary, and we tried to convey this in the book. You’ll see that we’ve included a remarkable bird’s-eye perspective of the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail set in the degraded environment of Pittsburgh, showing the surrounding smoking chimneys and the cloud of air pollution enveloping the city. With this image, you understand the complex’s big central tower provided clean, purified air for the building. It was intended to be tall enough to bring in fresh air, which was drawn down by large fans into the basement, filtered, humidified, and then conducted up through ducts in the walls into the courtrooms and the offices.

Before we conclude, could you summarize the overarching goals that guided you and your coauthors through the book’s creation?

First, we saw Richardson’s work as a window into the act of design, underscoring how design is not, as architects know, a linear process. This is at the heart of the book. Also, we hoped to dispel the idea of Richardson—or any great architect—as a lone figure. Architecture is made collaboratively, which becomes clear as we talk about Richardson’s studio as well as the connections with people like the Norcross brothers and Evans. Maybe the third idea relates to back in the 1930s when Mumford and Hitchcock helped rediscover Richardson’s work, and then more recently, Scully and O’Gorman. Richardson has been a source of revitalization for architecture at various points, and we hope there will be new ways in which he can provide inspiration going forward.

*Unless otherwise noted, illustrations are courtesy of the H. H. Richardson Drawings Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

How Stacey Berman Builds Worlds On Stage and Screen

Stacey Berman had been working as a costume designer for films when Covid struck. While the industry hit an enforced pause, her partner suggested that she read the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2002), edited by Rem Koolhaas. Intrigued by the multidisciplinary research, she decided to apply to the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) as a Master in Design Studies (MDes) student in the Narratives domain, graduating in 2023.

As a costume designer, Berman considers herself in the business of worldbuilding, a term popularized in the science fiction/fantasy writing community. Berman defines it as “setting up rules for fictional universes that reflect variable realities.” She wanted to translate the concept of worldbuilding from the more abstract realm of writing into the built environment. During her time at the GSD, she valued having the chance to work with colleagues in other disciplines, particularly architecture. Often, they approached situations from different angles. “I instinctively think first about the person in the environment,” she said, “whereas many of my peers think about the environment first, followed by the person.”

Berman’s costumes can be seen in the film A Different Man , currently in theaters. It stars Sebastian Stan as a man with a disfiguring facial condition who, after undergoing experimental surgery to drastically change his appearance, becomes involved in a play based on his life. Shooting for the film took place in the summer between the two academic years Berman spent at the GSD.

The project is her third collaboration with director Aaron Schimberg; Berman notes that they share the same person-first approach to their work. “In one draft of A Different Man, Aaron wrote 60-something named characters,” Berman explained. “There are always a few lead characters in a script, but there’s rarely a chorus of nuanced people ambling down the street beside them.”

Many of Schimberg’s projects, which include Go Down Death (2010) and Chained for Life (2017), involve nested frameworks: “movies within movies, time periods collapsing between eras, a theatrical production about events that previously unfolded on film—all of which require design that can accommodate the slipperiness between these worlds.” Berman noted how the close reading of critical theory in the Narratives domain informed her approach to the nuances of Schimberg’s work. In particular, she cited her experience working with Erika Naginski, Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Architectural History at the GSD, and former Open Project instructor Elisa Silva, who helped her develop her thinking on “how we position ourselves when we frame questions, research and work.”

Along with the makeup that drastically altered Stan’s face, costumes were another vehicle Schimberg emphasized to explore how appearance relates to performance. Post-treatment, Stan’s character Edward reinvents himself as Guy, who aspires to be an actor. Berman explains, “[W]hen Edward is dressing as Edward, the clothing he wears feels like clothing and not costume – i.e., it’s not notably performative. But when he starts dressing as Guy, we want to see the slippage between these characters and understand that he’s using clothing as a costume, to project to the world and himself that he’s an actor.”  Thus, Edward-as-Guy—in the tradition of so many people looking to copy a celebrity look or a social media microtrend—has a style made up of imitation and tropes. “First, we dressed him as an archetypal Juilliard alum, in an all-black outfit with brand new Converse shoes. Then, he moves through dressing like James Dean, in white tees with rolled sleeves, and at times a rusty orange ’40s-style coat that hints at classic Hollywood. He also wears a vintage brown leather jacket that we called ‘Al Pacino,’ but the internet thinks is a reference to Tyler Durden in Fight Club.”

Berman’s body of work encompasses a wide variety of genres. In addition to her collaborations with Schimberg, her recent films include Brittany Runs a Marathon, winner of the Audience Drama Award at Sundance in 2019, and The Miseducation of Cameron Post, starring Chloë Grace Moretz, which won the Grand Jury Prize the previous year. She has designed costumes worn in music videos for Fall Out Boy and Jenny Lewis.

Berman also works closely with with experimental theater groups and performance artists. She has enjoyed a long-term collaboration with Gerard & Kelly, former GSD design critics in architecture. Their project E for Eileen will screen on FranceTV starting in 2025, and a new work, Saints at a Disco, is currently in the pre-production stages.

Amid this packed schedule, Berman creates work on her own, including a project called Psychic Mending , which she initiated last January at SomoS Arts in Berlin. She is also developing a project about fitting rooms that stems directly from work that she started at the GSD and for which she won the MDes Research & Development Award, given annually to one student in each of the MDes program’s four domains.

Berman notes that the many aspects that make up her career aren’t that different from each other, or even from the way we operate in real life. Even getting dressed ourselves is a small act of worldbuilding. “In our daily lives when we try on a piece of clothing, we ask ourselves, am I this person? And when we are making a film or performance and we are in a fitting, it’s this same question: is this the character?” Berman frequently works on costume designs, especially for performance artists, where a character is closely linked to the person in the role. “The murkiness between am I this person and is this the character opens up myriad questions of identity, self-perception and representation,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how far apart they may seem, there’s some facet of self that carries to the character. You can’t erase it.”

 

An Interview with Richard Sennett: Democracy and Urban Form

In fall 1981, the eminent sociologist and urban theorist Richard Sennett delivered six public lectures at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), focused on ways in which the city’s spatial characteristics can foster—or forestall—democracy. This month, more than 40 years after the lectures’ original debut, Harvard Design Press and Sternberg Press published them as Democracy and Urban Form . In the book’s preface, Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism at the GSD, notes that despite the lectures’ age, they maintain relevance, inspiring designers “to think ethically, critically, and responsibly about which kinds of cities and societies they could be producing if they understood how individuals and groups relate to the spaces that they as professionals are designing.”

Harvard GSD’s Krista Sykes talked with Sennett about the evolution of his thoughts on urbanism, the need to take architecture seriously, and the fundamental importance of encountering others unlike oneself. Their interview followed a series of talks and panel discussions held at the GSD in October to celebrate the publication of Democracy and Urban Form.

Krista Sykes: Many concepts from your 1981 lectures hold true today; at the same time, your thoughts appear to have shifted in some ways. For example, during the panel you stated that, in recent decades, you have become more interested in “the mobilizing power of architecture,” which I understand as architecture’s potential to shape human interactions, rather than in its representative or symbolic abilities. What motivated this shift?

Richard Sennett: A couple of things. After I left the United States in the late 1990s, I went to the London School of Economics [LSE] and set up an architecture and urban studies program with Richard Burdett. This program was orientated to practical solutions to problems in Britain. It was a new country for me, and the notion of actually problem-solving—that’s the DNA of the LSE—got me thinking about what architecture could solve in a practical way for problems about economic inequality and so on. Yet, I also was very resistant to that because I think that architecture should be visionary rather than pragmatic. And I began to experience this as a very useful contradiction. My impulse was to say, “let’s think about what might be.” My colleagues at the LSE were thinking, “well, what do we do next? The government has asked us to solve this problem next year.” That stimulated me to think more about mobilizing our architecture.

A second aspect that made me believe in this: I was very struck in Britain that younger architects had lost faith in architecture. They thought it was only a representation of social and economic conditions. That seemed to me very sad—a very sad take on a profession which you think is merely the puppet of the social order. And although I’m trained as a sociologist, I don’t think sociology has that kind of power over the imagination, particularly of people who know how to practice an art.

Yet another thing that really got me going about the mobilizing power of architecture was that I worked for the United Nations for 10 years. In poor countries like Mali or Ghana, it was hard to maintain that the way things are built has nothing to do with the way in which people live. When you’re in a country in which there aren’t enough schools to go around, thinking about what a school should look like is part and parcel of being with a scarcity of resources; it’s not something separable from it. Certainly, the people that I worked with in Sub-Saharan Africa and also in the Far East didn’t see a divide between the expressive qualities of architecture and its practical qualities. That’s a distinction that happens in more privileged societies.

I was reminded of this a few months ago. We have a housing shortage in Britain, and a top housing official declared she didn’t want to build something that was beautiful. She wanted to build something that served a practical need. Only in a very spoiled, rich country could you draw the distinction between quality and quantity. That’s how I came to be much more interested in the qualities of how things look, the qualities of architecture that are of social value.

Likewise, in your 1981 lectures, you emphasize how cities foster democracy by facilitating discourse. Today, your focus is more on bodily presence—what you have referred to as the “democracy of the body.” What prompted this turn?

Well, I think part of the reason that a lot of young architects that I was teaching in London had lost faith in architecture was because they looked at architecture as a discursive practice. It isn’t. Certainly, the political aspects of democracy are as much physical and nonverbal as they are verbal. We always think about democratic form in terms of discourse, and that seems very limited to me. So, I gave a course one year, a research seminar called “What is a Democratic Door?” Originally, people thought this was a joke. But after three months, I had woken them to the notion that, yes, you can embody democracy in the form of a door. It was part of the same shift of taking architecture more seriously.

Perhaps architecture embodies greater power when the focus is on bodily presence instead of discourse, taking a person’s willingness to verbally interact out of the equation. People are exposed to difference simply by occupying a given space with others.

Oftentimes, people will embody a practice that they can’t or wouldn’t explain. It’s true about all aspects of life, that people do things which they are not consciously masterminding. That’s certainly true about the relations between people in social space, in physical space. An assembly line can be racially mixed, yet the people working on it aren’t thinking about what racial integration is. They’re just working together. That’s another aspect of this same shift; it’s too great a burden on people to explain what they’re doing as though the actions that they’re taking are consequences of conscious decisions. There’s a whole issue about democratic theory: often we act on knowledge which is not fully articulated to our self.

How does this translate to environments that lack the density and diversity for such exposure to difference? I’m thinking about the current political divide and our pending presidential election. How might we promote democracy outside of urban situations?

I’m quite worried about this. I mean, there’s no reason why people can do things unconsciously that are bad for them. When you look at Trump’s audiences, they’re all old, or mostly old, and they’re mostly white. I’m not sure those rallies could have actually worked if there were significant numbers of Black people or significant numbers of kids.

I had one of my students examine one of these rallies to take a reading on how old people were and how racially mixed they were. As you can imagine, up in the front near Trump’s rostrum, about five or six rows deep, it’s all mixed. When you get behind that, it’s a sea of whiteness, and it’s a sea of people who are, like me, going bald. My sense of it is that, if these are people who don’t have much daily physical experience being with people unlike themselves, that lack of physical interacting with people unlike oneself can easily lead to fantasies about the other, about who they are. That’s part of what we are facing. There are lots of studies showing that the more racial mixing you have in workplaces, the less racial prejudice is felt on both sides of the divide.

This dovetails with my final question. The 1981 lectures underscore the need to expose people to difference as a democratic undertaking because it allows them to understand themselves as one among many. You describe this experience as one of solitude. “In modern cities,” you stated, “we’regoing to have to come to terms with this new order of solitude.” How might you reposition this experience for the present day?

Well, the ultimate form of solitude that people are experiencing now is online. There’s an editing out of anything that people don’t want to hear. Online you’re in an echo chamber, essentially. That takes us back to the physical city where you have experiences in which you can’t just push a button and withdraw from other people. This has an old history. One of the reasons that politically conservative people don’t like to use public transport is because, involuntarily, there are people on buses or subways who are not like them. It’s a well-known sociological phenomenon. That’s why a lot of Americans like cars, because they’re like an isolation booth. And online has become an evolution of the that. You’re a button away from withdrawing, from being exposed to people unlike yourself.

That’s why physical space is so important. I think for architects, we’ve got to find ways in designing schools or hospitals to mix people up more. When I worked in Mali on a hospital where we mixed up urban lower- and middle-class people using the hospital with people who were agricultural workers, shepherds, and such, it was resisted at first by both groups. And we mixed up men and women as well, which was resisted. But in the end, it made the hospital more of a communal experience.

We have to think out of the box about this. That’s why I’m a great believer in bussing, and not a believer so much in homogenous local communities. That’s why a lot of the planning work I’ve done has looked at the edges, at how do you bring the edges between communities or different sections of the city alive—which I think of as democratic, with the edges being more democratic than the center. But that’s a whole other story.

Ask Me How

If you want to reach Germane Barnes, ask a young person for help. “All my friends know this,” he laughed, repeating their advice: “You’re an adult asking for something, he’s going to say no. You want him to do this lecture? Get a college freshman or a high school student to ask, he’ll do it immediately.”

And, in fact, within four minutes of arriving in Boston for his Wheelwright Prize lecture, he got a text from a member of the GSD African American Student Union and agreed to meet with the group that night at the Shake Shack. In addition to his work as an associate professor at the University of Miami, director of the Community, Housing & Identity Lab (CHIL), and principal of Studio Barnes, most of his time is spent mentoring others. “I didn’t have that representation,” he said, “and so I understand the importance of it.”

Barnes wanted to be an architect all his life, making a model of the Guggenheim Museum in seventh grade. Today, you can view his solo exhibit, “Columnar Disorder ,” at the Art Institute of Chicago. “A lot of this [work] started with the fact that, in architecture, you don’t see a lot of representation of people who look like me.” He earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture, but, he explains, “I never had a Black TA, Black professor, Black critic, Black juror.” In his survey classes, he was repeatedly shown the Colosseum—but never a building in Africa. “I know that the Mediterranean is vast,” he said, “and with its proximity to North Africa, there had to be some cross-pollination between the two. Why is that missing from what I’m learning?”

The Wheelwright Prize, awarded to Barnes in 2021 , afforded him the long-awaited opportunity to pursue the answer to that question, and to develop his own columnar order that reflects Black identity and experience, now on display at the Art Institute of Chicago.

On October 9, he spoke at the GSD about his project, “Where This Flower Blooms: Anatomical Transformations in Classical Architecture,” in a talk that wove together his historic research and creative process (including references to Megatron and Solange), emphasizing the importance of tactility and how joy drives his work.

It all began years earlier: “At one point in my life,” Barnes said, “I was known as the ‘porch guy.’” Supported by an award from the Graham Foundation, he studied the porch “across the diaspora from Africa to Chicago,” and spent several years creating pieces that focus on that “interstitial space” between outside and inside that’s been so critical to African American identity and community. “The porch is an important space for observation of collective identity and entry point to the home, as well as issues of race, segregation, and spatial politics,” writes Barnes. In describing his 2018 Pop-Up Porch , a portable eight-by-twenty-foot wooden container that opens to provide couch space and soft lighting for socializing, he writes, “The front porch has served as a refuge from Jim Crow restrictions; a stage straddling the home and the street; and the structural backdrop for meaningful life moments.”

Barnes’s Wheelwright research in Italian archives first took shape when a colleague told him that the Italian portico predated the African porch. He decided to research this “contested history.” While he knew that African history was inevitably interwoven with Italian—for example, Septimius, ruler of Rome, was of North African descent—there was no information about Africa in the architectural materials he sought in the library at the American Academy in Rome. Instead, he had to turn to archeology and anthropology.

Drawing from research he found in the archives and Paul Lachlan MacKendrick’s book North African Stones Speak, Barnes studied images of opus africanum, a North African system of stacking stones or bricks in a design both functional and beautiful, with examples in both Tunisia and Pompeii. He was also struck by opus sectile, a technique for creating collaged images made from any available materials. The pieces are not cut identically, as in a mosaic, but of all different sizes. The latter, he says, reflects so much of the African Diaspora and African American creativity; people have made beautiful and ingenious works with “whatever pieces they had.” Barnes began creating his own work in the opus sectile tradition. He pieced together butcher-block paper from a local Sicilian restaurant to create a world map that represents the actual size of each continent—rather than their typically distorted sizes centering western continents—to illustrate Africa’s significance in the global context and the influence of the Diaspora.

Through his research, Barnes found that Africa had columns before Greece; the Egyptians created the Papyrus order, which the Greeks took to create the Ionic, Corinthian, and Doric orders, Barnes explained. “We love to quote Vitruvius and talk about how the [Greek] columns are inspired by the female figure,” he said. Instead, he asked, “What if I make a column inspired by a Black figure, and then reimagine architecture through that lens?” He began to create a “truly Black columnar order,” returning to the question he proposed in his application for the prize. He developed a system of his own, which involved breaking every rule of the classical columnar orders. Barnes developed the three themes for his columns: identity, labor, and migration, and sought out materials that evoked the tactile qualities he appreciates. The result is a series of columns, masks, and drawings that reinsert the African tradition in Western architectural history.

The identity column, made of Spanish Marquina marble, was inspired by hair, with striations that look like undulating waves of braided, dreadlocked, and natural hair, and, from some perspectives, “a body emerging.” Barnes displayed the monumental work at the 2023 Venice Biennale alongside drawings that depict the identity column within the Pantheon. Small human figures at the column’s base symbolize the theorists who erased the existence of the Egyptian columns and African architecture and claimed it as their own invention with the Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian orders.

Barnes says he wants his family to see themselves in his work, to recognize their memories and experiences, which are interwoven through all of his projects (this infusion of the personal is partly why he feels that his columns are not reproducible in the same way the Greek columnar orders are intended to be). He created another iteration of the identity column, this time with synthetic hair woven and braided by Chicago artist SHENEQUA , who trained with Nick Cave. She included “every hairstyle [Barnes] knew” from childhood, watching his four sisters get their hair done, from “Bantu knots to overhand and extensions.” The final product is a nine-by-four-foot tapestry that was then wrapped around a column.

When he designed the migration pillar with waves to symbolize the millions of people lost to the Middle Passage, and selected poplar for its construction—a nod to Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit”—Barnes knew his sisters would recognize the allusion. And when they saw the red clay labor column, he says, “they’d think about working twice as hard for half the credit.” Acutely aware of the ways that African and African American people’s labor has been erased, he always makes sure to credit the craftspeople who fabricate his works.

His devotion to help break down barriers long upheld by systemic racism extends to how he thinks about gallery spaces for his installations, as well. Barnes took on the role of exhibition designer for his show at the Art Institute of Chicago. “I convinced them to let me do a stripe across the outside of the room,” he says. “It’s a way of identifying what’s going on in the space, and of saying that, at many white institutions, you have to reduce your Blackness. So, if you’re inside of [this space I designed], you get be unbridled—exactly who you are. When you’re in these public spheres, how much of yourself gets reduced, until you’re down to just a single strip of your identity?” The installation he created celebrates the unity of fragmented columns that split apart in the middle to allow viewers to see the perfectly aligned drawings on the wall in the background. Other columns rest at seat height. As someone for whom tactility and welcoming spaces are so important, Barnes invited participants to sit on and touch his work, as he’s done at other galleries in the past (each time, he was quickly corrected by curators).

A series of chairs he designed years earlier, “Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears a Crown,” were intended to be functional seats, as well. Those chairs—which turned out to be one of his biggest successes—evolved out of a series of mishaps in the early Covid days. When the project he’d planned to deliver for an event had to be reimagined for social distancing, Barnes created the chairs, thinking they’d be used for seating. Instead, the client displayed them as artworks. The chairs are made from materials typically found in a South Florida shotgun house—sheet metal, wood, and rope on the seats—in forms meant to mirror Black hair and hats, with chair backs that look like hair combs or the profile of a bejeweled crown. This became one of the projects he’d submit to the Wheelwright Prize jury, the members of which gathered at the GSD for a conversation with Barnes on October 10. Megan Panzano, GSD senior director of early design education and assistant professor of architecture, said she could see the germs of his columnar project in this series. The chairs—born out of what he thought was a failure—propelled him in a new direction in his work and helped him win the Wheelwright Prize.

He noted that the title of his Wheelwright research, “Where This Flower Blooms” comes from a poem by “our prophet, Tupac Shakur, who rivals Vitruvius.” Barnes often layers into his work all of his experiences and references—from pop culture to family stories to archival research. During his lecture, Barnes discussed Tupac’s poem about the beauty and resilience of a rose that rises up from a crack in the sidewalk, arguing that when we see a rose with broken petals rising up in the sidewalk, we don’t need to ask why it’s there but how it grew in a seemingly impossible place. “I’m aware of the weight that I carry on my shoulders because I’m a descendant of slavery and freedom fighters and Civil Rights activists who have done so much to get me to this point,” Barnes said. “That’s what’s allowed me to be so successful. It’s not just me doing the work. It’s my family doing the work. It’s me using all the ancestral knowledge I’ve gathered from my mom and my grandmother and turning that into spatial praxis. If you see me, you’re going to see a Black man. I’m going to wear that as a badge of honor.”

Barnes’ authenticity also allows him to reach the young people he’s devoted to mentoring. His impact on students at the GSD events was clear; they eagerly engaged him with questions about his career, design history, and process. Barnes gestured to the Black design colleagues with whom he shared the space, illustrating how much has changed since he was in school twenty years ago.

He offered advice to students on establishing their own authority and sense of community, and, when one student asked how he manages working from traumatic histories, Barnes replied, “When I work, it’s from a place of joy…. This isn’t about trauma. It’s about perseverance. This is about resilience. It’s about making something out of nothing, and sure, you might have scars and scratches. Your shirt might be a little bit tattered, or you might speak a little bit differently…. But, it’s still the rose. I hope you’re able to work from a position of joy, because I guarantee that the work will be so much better.”

Carrying that forward, his next projects include a collaboration in Dallas to “transform a space filled with hate into a space of hope, as restorative and design justice, with former GSD professor, Christian Stayner of Stayner Architects, and Jennifer Bonner of MALL, as well as the local Fort Worth office ch_studio,” and a solo project in Memphis, Tennessee. Both will allow him to extend the work he undertook for the Wheelwright Prize, bringing his work out of the gallery and into functional spaces that will invite users to experience—and, finally, touch—his designs.